Commissioner Greg Hartmann read the data and saw it “exceeding budget by close to $100 million."

He warned that it could mean “extreme rate increases beyond the rate increases that our taxpayers and ratepayers have had to suffer anyway."

Sewer bills in the county this year went another 6 percent higher.

In a letter last Friday from Hamilton County administrator Christian Sigman, Interim City Manager Scott Stiles was told the project overruns are "merely a symptom of larger management problems within MSD."

Some are calling for the firing of embattled director Tony Parrott, who has been at the helm for eight years.

The county has no official say in who the MSD director is, but it does have the sway of influencing an outcome.

Mayor John Cranley noted Tuesday that it would be "inappropriate" to fire Parrott ahead of an investigation by the City Manager's Office.

Commission President Chris Monzel stopped short of calling for Parrott's firing, but told WLWT News 5 that "There's got to be some change in direction, in leadership, over there because it's not moving in the right direction."

The Lick Run project direction was an MSD success story at first.

The Environmental Protection Agency wanted a tunnel to collect 2 billion gallons of storm water at a cost of $550 million.

The MSD alternative was to open an underground stream and have wetlands around it, shaving the cost to $240 million.

But now there's a dispute over the data MSD has supplied to the county.

Hamilton County feels it has been misled and that the numbers are inaccurate.

The county adds up the overrun total to $87 million.

Commissioner Todd Portune, the lone Democrat on the county's governing body, pointed out that no money has actually been spent yet.

"We're talking projections here," Portune said.

He sees no upside to getting into yet another pitched battle with the city over sewer district projects, not with a federally-mandated $3.2 billion upgrade in motion.

Portune and his two commission colleagues will meet in executive session to discuss the matter Wednesday.

While they might find some common ground, they will lack a construction blueprint to untangle the spaghetti that is the current MSD.

It's owned by the county and operated by the city.

The county approves spending and the arrangement has resulted in multiple disputes over the years. By contractual agreement, it has another four years to run.

"It's dysfunctional at best," Monzel quipped. "I mean, to me it's just the wrong type of system set up. It's basically serving two masters."